How to Make Your LEGO Come to Life!

It's become a whole thing. Using LEGO figures and models to create polished photos of our favorite toys in action. I've admired it forever, but I've never really tried it myself. My X-Wing box art video was the closest I've ever gotten. So today I thought, let's try this out for real. Not only am I going to try and make nice looking images using photography and Photoshop, but I'll even try using other materials to help bring these guys to life. Well, that's what I hope, because I actually don't know if this is going to work. Only one way to find out. Let's begin. Let's go ahead and buy a LEGO set we can use, because again, doing Star Wars is going to be a bit repetitive, isn't it? I spent some time on lego.com and soon, I was broke. However, I already bought it now, so we might as well use it. I couldn't wait to build this majestic LEGO set, so I did not waste any time. If you're unfamiliar with the Lord of the Rings, this is a recreation of Rivendell, home to the elves and the place the Fellowship of the Ring was formed. It's very dreamy and fantastical, which is exactly why I thought this would be such a great fit for my ideas. Building this took forever, but let me tell you, this is one of the best LEGO building experiences I've ever had. The details on this thing are just insane, both interior and exterior. Just perfect for our little experiment. Time to bring this into our photo studio, and that's when I realized it's too big for my spinning platform, so I used a larger Ikea plank to make sure it fits. The lack of stability made me nervous as hell, but we should be good. Now, I began rearranging my lights to create what I thought might be a good first setting. I needed one bright light as a sunlight, kind of, and then a few secondaries for maybe some extra color or directional light. It was a little bit of trial and error, but eventually I liked what I had and had to put my camera in place. For my first shot, I wanted to have a relatively wide overall shot of the Fellowship of the Ring, like them sitting in a circle. This was just tweaking the light positions, camera position, and camera settings until I had something at least half decent. I'm sure you already know the magic with me is in the editing, I'm definitely not the best photographer, but for now, I just need a shot that is usable. I took a whole bunch of similar shots and began sorting out which ones were the best. I ended up choosing this image to start with. Not great yet, but let's get to work and see what we can do. I began with denoising it just a little bit so it's nice and clean, and after a few subtle lighting tweaks, I loaded this into Photoshop. First, I had to mask out the background stuff and I did this by hand to get the sharpest result. This one ended up not needing much editing apart from the background, because most of it is actual lego already and it looks pretty good on its own. I cropped it to have the circle of people nicely centered and painting some details in the back over there to make sure it's not that weirdly cut off. From here, really all I did was replace the ground below with something that has a similar look as the rocks and putting a nice bluish color behind the model. With glows, I tried giving it that dreamy Rivendell look and that helped a ton. I was, however, disappointed by the amount of stuff I was able to do, because after a camera raw filter to spice it up, it was basically done already and it looks fine. It just doesn't feel like much of an accomplishment. It's just a nice photo of the set. Time to step it up and do something slightly more intense. For my second try, I focused more on the right area of Rivendell. I put Arwen and Aragorn holding hands up there. This is the image I ended up with and you can already tell this lends itself a little bit more for some background work. After cutting it out, I put some mountains behind it on the left to fill up the empty area over there. Then, I quickly moved on to the sky image I found. I used various adjustments to blend everything here together and I made sure to have a split tone effect. Blue light coming from the right, which of course is visible in the original photo and the main white light from the sun on the left. It took me a second to get it all right, but in the end, we are left with a very pretty darn dreamy result. To make it extra magical, I made sure it's very vivid and colorful as well and I think that looked pretty decent. Now, once again, it still felt too easy. This is not the experience I expected to have and that is when I decided to go a completely different route, minifigures only. Using baking soda, I tried replicating a bed of snow. I thought it'd be fun to make an image where all of our heroes march through the snow together on the quest of destroying the One Ring. The density of baking soda makes it look pretty well skilled with these minifigs, perfect for my idea. After everything was in place the way I wanted, I took the shot and got started. So, we've got three I think we could potentially use. There's this one, this and this and these are basically the same, just different depth of field, but I think the one with just slightly more detail is nicer and let's begin with this one actually. First off, I want to increase shadows a little bit so we get some extra detail in there. In general, I think we can brighten this up a little bit and if we zoom in, there is quite some grain. So, let's go ahead and see if we can kind of get rid of that. Here you go, that looks a lot better already. Then I guess let's drop this into Photoshop and get started. Unfortunately, however, this of course begins with cutting this out. So, let me just do that real quick. It's going to be a bit tricky because this edge is blurred, but we'll see how that goes. All around this edge, the snow, I'm going to fade out later, just like this and then with the blur tool in hand, I'm just going to blur out all of these edges in the background. This won't look perfect at first, but just trust the process, I guess. Here you go, nice and blurry. All of this has to be really nice and soft. There you go and this as well. Okay, then we're gonna need a background image for the sky and some mountains maybe. Let's have a look on Envato Elements. See, most of this looks pretty good. I'm pretty sure this image will work perfectly. Let's have a look, maybe this side. There you go, something like that. Then we gotta make sure the blur matches with the foreground. So, let's do something like this, nice and blurry and then I suppose it's all adjustment layers to make this match. First off, we need a little bit less dark tones in the background and in the foreground, we need some more blue instead, like this. That is definitely starting to look like something. Now, first, let's go ahead and fix these weird dark edges on these background characters, just with a very bright layer on top. It might even create a very subtle highlight effect too, so that's nice. Dude, look at that difference. That's so much better. And actually, I do think in general, we could use some more highlights over here, just on top of some of these characters. Obviously, this is daylight, so it should be a lot. Guys, I really, really feel like this is just that cherry on top. I mean, look at that. I love that. Maybe I'll make the background even vaguer, just more hazy, I guess. Kind of like this, seems about right. And then from my own overlay pack, I'm using the snow overlays to, of course, add some snow. What a surprise. Just making that a bit bigger, like this. It's got to be very subtle, nothing too crazy. And then I'm also using number 20. Here you go. You can barely even see it, but it's very nice and subtle. And some bigger ones on top. Oh, doesn't that look bloody lovely. I don't know about you guys, but I'm dying to see what this looks like with a camera raw filter. Let's go ahead and play around with all of these sliders. Although, to be fair, most of the lighting section already seems pretty good. It's mostly color grading I'm interested in to give it a nice cold tone. Lots of blues. Yes, that is starting to look nice. Damn, dude. Finally, something that actually looks nice. I don't really like the previous two, but this, this is nice. I like it. On to the next one. For this next attempt, I went absolutely crazy and put Darth Vader in there on a little platform I put together so he's jumping. I put him and Gandalf in a dueling position and honestly, I was most excited for this one so far. The lightsaber would make a great light source too. This has got to be the best photo I've taken today. Let me just increase shadows a lot. As you can see, look at all that detail in Vader there. That's incredible. This is a great photo. I'm sure we can make this work. Let's open this up in Photoshop. First, we of course have to get rid of the little support for Darth Vader and AI is actually the best option for this. I'd be an idiot not to use this right now. And we'll click Generative Fill, Generate, and here we go. And there you go. That's crazy. All right. And you know the drill. Let's cut this out. For this one, I'm gonna go very detailed though because I feel like this might be the best one. I just want to make sure this is absolutely perfect. And there, not a lot changes, but you know what this means. We need a background. And this time, instead of just finding an image online, I generated this using Firefly. And actually, it's freaking perfect. This is literally exactly what I was looking for so let's go ahead and use that. We do, however, need that same blur again. And then as a whole, I want the whole thing to be just a lot darker. I want this to be evening slash night time-ish. So, I'm thinking something like this could work pretty well. And I'm just gonna copy that bluish layer too. Oh, look at that. Now, let's make those guys ever so slightly darker too. Um, then now let's make his lightsaber nice and bright. We of course have done this a thousand times already. No worries there. First, I'll go ahead and make a shape layer. There you go. I will go straight into layer styles, select inner glow. And actually, that is pretty much good already. We want to have sort of an orangey tint. Then we need an outer glow like this one. We'll make that very small and that has to be also very very white-ish, very bright. Then a drop shadow which we're gonna make red. That's gonna be a tad bigger like this, I think. And then another one that is even bigger like so. And then as you can see, that already looks really nice. However, to really enhance it, let's add a solid color that is red on Linear Dodge Add. Our classic blur technique and very softly paint over his saber like that to create a nice red halo kind of thing. Beautiful! Nice and bright. I like it. Then, um, we need some of that light bouncing off of the characters. The way I'm gonna do that is just using hue and saturation layers, I'm guessing. And then with blend if, we can really nicely blend those together because now I can simply paint with this red color over his face and there you go. Oh, ladies and gentlemen, would you look at that? And then the same exact thing to Gandalf because he as well is pretty close to Darth Vader's lightsaber. Dude, look at that. I told you this was gonna be the best one. And maybe I can even paint some of that red in the snow over here. Hell yeah, dude! That's great! Anyway, you already guessed it. We definitely need some of that snow once again since this is a snowy landscape. Once again, from my own Optics Plus overlay pack. If you want to get that, link down below. I don't really know what to add anymore but let me just say I am loving this. Let's go ahead and see how much more intense we can make this using a Camera Raw filter. Once again, it's mostly gonna be coloring, maybe some more clarity and texture. It's gonna make it nice and bluish, maybe some purples in And then I really think it's done. This is my favorite one. I'm not gonna lie, these first two images, I think, are pretty bad. They're just boring and lazy, I suppose. But those second two, I actually really like and I do think that those kind of saved this entire video. I'm not sure if I needed to buy that entire set for this video. I think I could have done without. Thank god I'm actually a pretty big LEGO fan and I wanted this set anyway. Anyway, if you enjoyed this video, make very sure to leave a like, subscribe, hit the bell not to miss a single future video, and I hope I'll see you in the next one.